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Subjects

Abstract

Globally accelerating trends in societal development and human environmental impacts since the mid-twentieth century1,2,3,4,5,6,7 are known as the Great Acceleration and have been discussed as a key indicator of the onset of the Anthropocene epoch6. While reports on ecological responses (for example, changes in species range or local extinctions) to the Great Acceleration are multiplying8, 9, it is unknown whether such biotic responses are undergoing a similar acceleration over time. This knowledge gap stems from the limited availability of time series data on biodiversity changes across large temporal and geographical extents. Here we use a dataset of repeated plant surveys from 302 mountain summits across Europe, spanning 145 years of observation, to assess the temporal trajectory of mountain biodiversity changes as a globally coherent imprint of the Anthropocene. We find a continent-wide acceleration in the rate of increase in plant species richness, with five times as much species enrichment between 2007 and 2016 as fifty years ago, between 1957 and 1966. This acceleration is strikingly synchronized with accelerated global warming and is not linked to alternative global change drivers. The accelerating increases in species richness on mountain summits across this broad spatial extent demonstrate that acceleration in climate-induced biotic change is occurring even in remote places on Earth, with potentially far-ranging consequences not only for biodiversity, but also for ecosystem functioning and services.

Competing interests

Corresponding authors

Extended data figures and tables

This conceptual figure shows the approach implemented in the main text to visualize richness change over time based on the raw data (Figs. 2, 3). a, The mean richness change per year (ΔSR/∆t = (SRt2 − SRt1)/(t2 − t1)) across all summits was calculated (Fig. 3). b, The mean richness change per year accumulates with time to yield absolute changes in species richness (black line in Fig. 2). c, d, Variability in the absolute change in species richness was visualized by randomly sampling ΔSR from all mountains available each year, but adding the s.d. within a region and year. The displayed range in Fig. 2 illustrates the 5th and 95th percentiles of the resulting richness change values from 1,000 runs (orange shading in Fig. 2). This approach reveals changes in variability among mountains over time while also showing overall variability for time steps where only a few summits were sampled (particularly in early time periods).

Trend lines are interpolated from a simple linear model and are in many cases not significant. Species richness was quantified as the difference between vegetation surveys from the same summit at different times (Extended Data Fig. 1). No nitrogen data were available for Svalbard. The number of observations (comparison of survey and resurveys) are: Svalbard, 7; Northern Scandes, 54; Southern Scandes, 27; Scotland, 7; NW Carpathians, 16; Eastern Alps, 122; Western Alps, 48; SE Carpathians, 9; Pyrenees, 12 (see Fig. 1 for more details).

Historical species richness was exceeded within a small sampling area during recent resurveys. Species richness of the historical survey (yellow) contrasted with a species richness accumulation curve of the recent surveys on summits where the highest occurrence of each recent species was estimated to the nearest 1-m elevation. The number of species found historically within the uppermost 10 m of a summit was exceeded within the uppermost 5 m in the most recent resurveys. This analysis includes all 157 European summits for which such data are available, regardless of whether the historical species number was reached in recent times. The blue circle visualizes average species richness of the recent surveys within the uppermost 10 m.